Development of an Internet of Things(IoT) Monitoring Framework for Assisted Agriculture

Internet of Things (IoT) is the cutting edge technology which is going to create a lot ofopportunities in the near future. Development of Smart Devices that interact with theenvironment and make intelligent decisions will make life easier for all. Improving agricultural productivity is essential for increasing profitability and meeting the rapidly growing demand for agricultural produce due to rapid population growth across the world. Agricultural productivity can be increased by understanding and forecasting crop performance which is presently done manually in our country. Crop recommendation is currently based on data collected in field-based agricultural studies that capture crop performance under a variety of conditions (e.g., soil quality and environmental conditions). Additionally, the quality of manually collected crop performance data is very low, because it does not take into account earlier conditions that have not been observed by the human operators. All this also consumes a lot of time and energy when done manually. Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as IoT devices (e.g., wireless sensor networks, network-connected weather stations, cameras, and smart phones) can be used to collate vast amount of environmental and crop performance data, ranging from time series data from sensors, to spatial data from cameras,to human observations collected and recorded via mobile smart phone applications. This data can then be analyzed to filter out invalid data and compute personalized crop recommendations for any specific agricultural land. In this paper, we propose to design and develop an IoT based Monitoring, Controlling and Decision Support framework that can automate the collection of environmental, soil, fertilization, and irrigation data; automatically correlate such data and filter-out invalid data from the perspective of assessing crop performance; and compute crop forecasts and personalized crop recommendations for any agricultural farm.